citygardenguide

Two particularly inspirational sites are the Gardens of Forgiveness in Central Beirut and the Duisburg Nord Landscape Park in Druisberg Germany. The Gardens of Forgiveness (Hadiqat As-Samah), designed by Kathryn Gustavson and Neil Porter, are being created in a 16-block area that was ravaged in Lebanon's 16-year civil war. The cleanup of the area uncovered ruins from Roman to medieval times, and these have been incorporated into the master plan. The gardens were conceived as a place of reconciliation and a sign of the country's rebirth. Each garden is laden with reference and symbolism. An archeological garden is being planted with herbs grown in Roman times. Elsewhere, the plant pallet is drawn from all of the regions that make up modern Lebanon. This project seems particularly relevant in view of the tumultuous but hopeful events occurring there now.

Duisburg Nord Landscape Park in Germany took 12 years to complete. Peter Latz and Partners transformed the old Thyssen Steelworks into a hugely successful landscape park incorporating the industrial buildings to create a new park where the past is freely acknowledged and in come cases recycled. Nature is sometimes used to beautify, sometimes used to remediate and sometimes just allowed to exist. This is a place where rock climbers use abandoned ore bunkers to practice, where a grid of cherry trees creates a serene plaza in the shadow of the former blast furnace and where scuba divers practice in the old water-cooling pool.

These are new kinds of landscapes. Each in its own way grapples with the harsh reality of the environmental, ecological, and aesthetic havoc we have wreaked in our communities. Instead of trying to recreate an idealized form of nature, the designers here are using metaphor and are acknowledging and often incorporating the many levels of the past into their projects. Plants are frequently used allegorically in formal settings or else as part of natural systems used to remediate severely polluted land.

The show is an acknowledgement that there are no clean starts anymore, and that the past for better or worse cannot or maybe should not be eradicated. These projects grapple with the results of the worst impulses of humanity----it is encouraging that many of the solutions here are so beautiful.